OMG...blogging?

After I signed up for UWP 101 in this section, the name Chris Schaberg appeared onto my “myucdavis” home page. My reaction was, “Yes! Sweet!” because I had him for English 3, and I enjoyed the way he taught. His way of teaching allows you to be confused and abstract where there’s not one particular answer. When I was notified that he wanted us to be confused I was relieved because I thought that there had to be one correct answer. I just remember English classes that I took in high school and how the teacher was always looking for a particular answer. Apparently, English doesn’t have one correct answer like science does.

I think that the room for ambiguity and confusion permits us to critically think more and look at things from various perspectives, not just one. Although, sometimes Chris’ comments on certain posts and complicate things more, which makes it more confusing. I think part of it is because he’s an English major so his ability to analyze and critique writing is phenomenal. He brings up interesting things and raises very challenging questions. For instance, on one of my posts Chris commented, “is money really 'essential', or is it in fact extra, added on to the materials that actually *do* seem to make people 'happy'? In other words, can we imagine 'economies' without money, and might these economies get closer to the 'essence' of material?” This comment made me rethink about what I said and look at things from another perspective. The question about economies getting closer to the essence of material confused me then, and it still confuses me now.

On the first day of class when we found out that the class was revolved around blogging, I know I wasn’t the only one thinking “What?! No way! This is so cool!” The whole notion of blogging just reminded me of Myspace and Facebook. Before I took this class, I have only written one blog on Myspace in my entire life. The blog I wrote was about my hatred for a certain someone and was very informal. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure what a blog was, but I went ahead and wrote one for the heck of it. I was a bit nervous for our first post because I didn’t know what was expected for a blog in general. I’m pretty sure almost everyone was feeling the same way as I was.

The idea of having our written assignments displayed to the public was very motivational for me because I was not only writing for the teacher to read, but also for my fellow classmates and random viewers. Reading other students’ blogs made me realize how many great writers there are. Seeing that my classmates wrote amazing posts influenced me write well and edit my writing until I felt good about it. A plus about blogging is that after publishing the post, we can still go back and edit the posts as many times as we’d like. Where as on paper, we wouldn’t be able to edit our writing after turning it in. Blogging kind of seems a bit informal, but it’s not when you write like you’re writing an essay. Since my blog was being read and graded, I knew I had to write intelligently. Hence, the format of blogging for this class wasn’t wholly informal. I think that blogging did allow us to incorporate our own thoughts, feelings, and personality more. I found myself writing humorously than I ever had in my previous English classes.

Personally, I very much so love the idea of blogging. It lets us explore the different ways in writing aside from the typical written essays on paper. The goal of not using paper succeeded, and I think that everyone attained a good experience from this class. Well, at least I did.